Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Thursday, September 30, 2004

Predictive Playoff Metrics: Tom Tippett,Components & the Craft of the Small Project

In the last entry, I talked about a ridiculous attempt at
cobbling together ill-considered measures to predict the outcome
of playoff series. Any kind of prediction of a short series of
games (five or seven) cannot be made, in itself, a science. You
can, however, use measures to improve your chances of
differentiating the very skilled and a little lucky from the
somewhat skilled and very lucky.

Beyond baseball, managers have to do this all the time, what
I'll call "the Playoff Challenge". You have a small,
quick-turnaround project or effort, you're going to make almost
as many decisions in a short period as you would in a fuller,
longer project. Successful efforts and projects have a fixed
overhead of planning and design and forethought and set-up and
clean-up decisions to make, and this foundation is not going to
be much different for a quick effort than it is for a larger one.
A manager will make more decisions with fewer chances for
mid-course corrections. Good decisions are just as necessary, but
not as valuable, because the living, operating moments of that
good decision are shorter-lived and have less time to accumulate
advantages. On the plus side, though, the mediocre ones hurt you
for less time, too.

Learning how to use historical information, but also to keep
light on your feet to adapt to the changes whizzing by on a short
endeavor is a challenge much like a team trying to win a short
series. A lesser team has a better chance of upsetting a superior
opponent over a 7-game series by beating them 4 times than they
do in a 162-game series by beating them 82 times. So measuring
overall quality will certainly be a factor, but
not the factor.

So how do you isolate out smaller factors that might have
disproportionate impact on a short series that will take place
soon?

RECENT RECORD AND HIDDEN INDICATORS

Tom Tippett, the creator of Diamond
Mind Baseball, the most sophisticated stat-based simulation
of baseball on the field, posted on his
weblog in a 9/21 entry called "And down the stretch
they come..." some data to help people try to think
about which teams might have the best chances for success in the
playoffs and World Series. Tippett's work is figuring out how to
create mathematical models that reflect reality as closely as
possible, so it's never the clean-room Ivory Tower math that is
always so interesting to read but usually lacking in context and
applied torque. His stuff, when he presents it, is among the most
interesting and the most practical sabermetric research
we can get our hands on.

Here's his intro:

Two weeks from today, the
first pitch of the postseason will be sent plateward, and
while we don't yet know who'll be on the mound or in the
batter's box at that moment, it's almost certain that the
series in question could go either way. That's always true of
any short series, but it seems especially so this year, with
all of the leading playoff contenders riding a wave of
success since the trade deadline.

In an effort to gauge the quality of the teams most likely to
survive the regular season, I decided to take a look at how
they've performed since the trade deadline. Some of the
contenders made important changes to their team at that time,
so their records since the deadline might be a better
indicator of the quality of those teams than their overall
records.

Like other sabermetricians, Tippett applies a momentum model.
A general test many use is Win-Loss records in the second half of
the season. Based on his own number-crunching, he tweaked his
measure of recent-record from second half to the 7 weeks from the
July 31st trading deadline to when he wrote the piece. ¿Why July
31st instead of the beginning of the second half, around July 1?
Because contending teams tend to be active in trading for
complementary pieces in the weeks leading up to that July 31
"deadline" (it's not such a rigid
barrier; creative general managers can still make significant
moves after that, but its administratively simpler before and
because many teams act as though it's a hard barrier, many make
the moves before then anyway, reducing options for patient G.M.s,
making even the patient ones have to pander some to the panic).
So the roster a team takes into the playoffs will be a closer to
the post-July 31 roster than the roster it carried in July, and
these moves can affect teams for good and ill.

So Tippett's approach, measuring the win-loss record of the
team as close as it can to being the team it will take into the
playoffs is a good way to trim data points and focus down on the
more critical. But win-loss records, while they measure actual
success, may hide some part of a team's quality because luck
plays a little factor, and the smaller the run of games that
makes up the record, the more likely there will be some drift,
some bit of hiccup between the actual win-loss record
during that stretch and the components of winning.

Tippett, like many sabermetricians, quantifies measures of
winning, which can also indicate relative strength and potential
for future winning. Tippett's measure is Net Runs, the runs a
team scored minus the number they allowed. Runs, of course, are
results themselves, results of other components, in this case
bases earned through hits and walks. So he uses a third metric,
TBW (total bases plus walks), and creates another measure for
each team, Net TBW (what they created minus what they yielded).

By breaking building blocks into smaller sub-assemblies, he
builds a foundation for measuring overall quality using multiple
tests. His table for the contenders as of September 21 looks like
this:

The Tippett analysis is flat-out interesting. The won-lost
records over the seven weeks show that none of the teams with a
chance at the playoffs is lugging -- all have good records. The
Cards had the best record in this time slice, just as they would
the rest of the season if you removed this set of games from the
sample.

In the American League, the won-lost record lines up really
smoothly with the TBW, and reasonably well with Net Runs, with
Anaheim clearly overproducing runs relative to their components.
In 2002, the Angels who won the World Series had underperformed
most of their component measures Here, for the Angels and As to
compete with the others, they'll need more than their share of
good bounces and breaks, and while in a short series that can
easily happen, chance tends to even out for most teams.

In the National League, there are more seams, some bigger
differences between actual records and components. The
Giants have the best Net TBW by quite a bit, the best Net Runs by
a noticeable step, and a good record, but not quite as good as
three other very good teams. The senior circuit's match-ups, as
measured by momentum and components of recent efforts, is pretty
even, though the Cards and Giants are the leaders.

Analysis can't end here. There are a lot of other factors you
want to stitch into your judgement of which is the better team in
any individual match-up.

Team tendencies: Some teams have a strong ability to
beat up on pitching of one kind or another (left-handed, or
sinker-slider, or power pitching, or ambidextrous).
Others look feeble against that. Since most human systems are
self-amplifying, organizations tend to produce (and sometimes
even go to the trouble of acquiring) players of similar aptitudes
over and over, sometimes adhering to the pattern over decades
(Dodgers at 3rd base, Athletics at shortstop from about 1901
until Bert Campaneris). Boston's home park favors hitters who bat
from the right side, so the team will load up with right-handed
pull hitters so you don't want to put up too many lefty pitchers.
The patterns are well-known even when they aren't true;
it's an automatic thought that you throw left-handed pitchers
against the Yankees because they build their team around batters
who hit from the left side to take advantage of the reachable
right-field fence, so lefty pitchers have the potential to do a
better job of supressing their left-handed hitters. This year,
that isn't true; the team is very balanced, with a microscopic
statistical edge against left-handed pitchers (their acquisition
of Gary Sheffield means the Bronxians' marquee offensive player
is right-handed this year), tweaking the chemistry. But it goes
ebyond "teams" because at key junctures, the smaller
components, the players, will decide outcomes.

Individual tendencies: Each game itself is broken down
into a series of pitcher versus batter & batter versus
pitcher matchups. At many ordinary moments, and at a few of the
critical ones, one side or the other will get a match-up that
favors them strongly. You can examine historical
pitcher-to-batter match-up info, and sometimes you get the
roughly 20 plate appearance history that crosses the line for a
pretty good indicator. It beats the heck out of the model I
pointed to in the last entry -- matching up, for example, 3rd
basemen head-to-head, because rarely will one team's 3rd sacker
interact in a focused way with the opposition's.

If you add these to the momentum factors like Tippett's, you
can better gauge the probabilities of one playoff team winning
over the other. The shortness of the series makes the random
factors more likely to weigh in than they would over a whole
season, but better teams usually win more series, even the short
ones.

BEYOND BASEBALL

In non-baseball organizations, you can apply these models to
your own "Playoff Challenges".

Your short, intense projects or efforts or campaigns will be
more highly affected by random factors. High-quality achievement
will be more diluted by a smaller series of events because
"Quality will out in the end" is a long-term, glacial,
process.

That doesn't mean you ignore quality, but it does mean as a
manager you have to attend to more small details and respond more
quickly, being more aggressive about matching people up in ad hoc
teams to complement skills, being more willing to accept certain
kinds of imperfections in exchgange for harvesting the unforeseen
advantages that pop up.

It's a partially different skill set from being successful
over the long haul where long-term probabilities as known by
"The Book" are likeliest to yield the highest returns.
The short, intense effort requires knowledge of the book, but a
greater willingness to run against it at the "right"
time, and those "right" times will dominate more of the
outcome in the shorter series of events.

This difference is why some managers, even ones
with long records of mediocrity, seem to have a knack for
helping their teams win playoff series, while others
who manage well over a long season have a knack for lower yields
in playoff series.

To succeed at your own Playoff Challenges, embrace metrics,
but embrace the knowledge that randomness will have a
proportionately higher effect on the outcomes than on a longer
effort. Grab the edges the environment offers you, even the ones
you wouldn't normally pursue, make the most of every event, every
choice, every affordance. The playoffs can be fickle, but you
increase your chances if you are flexible and bold.

9/30/2004 07:43:00 AM posted by j @ 9/30/2004 07:43:00 AM

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

THE CURSE OF THE BUDBINO: MetricsLessons From Playoff Predictions

Too many managers don't know how to handle the metrics their
organizations provide them. Given that absence of understanding,
they are probably not in a position to ask for help creating
better ones, and it's a long reach to the best situation: A
manager designing metrics for the specific group and situation.

It requires numeracy, yes, but a lot of very numerate people
don't have enough craft knowledge to be able to carve out
measures that differentiate the relevant from the less-critical.
Just being numerate is not enough -- understanding context is a
mandatory foundation for success.

There are some great examples of context, both present and
missing, to learn through baseball. With the playoffs coming up,
I thought it'd be particularly cogent to use some examples of
analysis people use to attempt to predict who will win playoff
series.

TRIUMPH OF THE SWILL

My very least favorite form of baseball playoff analysis is
the position-by-position compare and contrast. Because the
match-ups aren't yet jelled, I have no example to point you at,
but if you read daily papers or weekly sports pubs, you're almost
certain to see at least one set of this form that never fails to
subtract from human understanding. The model works off the
assumption that even though the game does not involve individual
duels between each team's player at each position (the way
basketball almost does), that if you match up each team's player
at a position and compare and contrast them, then decide which
team is better off at that position, sort of add up the "in
favor of" count for each side, it will reveal some basic
trend.

It's a basic 7th grader world view: Sheldon had to choose who
to invite to the Supermall on Saturday; Britney is popular with
his peer group, she already has some breast development, and she
knows the name of the Brewers' utility infielder and his batting
average; Kaysie on the other hand doesn't have pimples, is
reputed to make out, gets good grades, and her family has a
well-stocked refrigerator. Britney 3, Kaysie 4. Choice decided.
(By the way, there are lots of adults who make decisions
made on counting, sometimes by weighting and adding-up, more of a
10th grade world view. Most of these adults are male, but not
all. Weight and add-up systems like this can be useful for
examination and discussion and sometimes for winnowing a big
pile of choices to a manageable number, but they're rarely useful
for making a final decision).

Not to pick on the Milwaukee Journal specifically, I present one
of theirs from three years ago (because it was the best
example I could find in ten minutes of searching). Here's
snippets from their analysis, just enough so that if you're not
familiar with the model, you'll get the drift:

World Series:
Position-by-position matchups

Last Updated: Oct. 26,
2001

FIRST BASE

New York's Tino Martinez
vs. Arizona's Mark Grace: Martinez hasn't hit much in the
post-season but is still counted on to be a primary
run-producer for the Yankees. After years of playing with the
foundering Cubs, Grace is finally getting his World Series
spotlight. He doesn't have the same pop as Martinez but is a
solid .300 hitter. Grace had to leave the decisive Game 5 of
the NLCS with a strained hamstring, which could still be a
problem. Edge: Even.

SECOND BASE

New York's Alfonso
Soriano vs. Arizona's Craig Counsell: Soriano is a
special rookie who broke the backs of the Seattle Mariners
with his ninth-inning home run in Game 4 of the ALCS. He also
makes mental mistakes at times. Counsell is one of those
players whose destiny is to shine in the post-season. He
appears to have ordinary skills but produces extraordinary
results in October. Edge: Even.

SHORTSTOP

New York's Derek Jeter
vs. Arizona's Tony Womack: Jeter had a miserable ALCS,
batting .118 with no extra-base hits. That should make the
Diamondbacks very nervous, because Jeter is a fabulous player
who usually does something to win a game or two each series.
Womack has speed but does not get on base enough to fully
utilize it. He has not been much of a factor in the
post-season. Edge: Yankees.

LEFT FIELD

New York's Chuck
Knoblauch vs. Arizona's Luis Gonzalez: Knoblauch plays
left field at times as if he is a converted infielder, which
he is. He still does some nice things, however, such as
batting .333 out of the leadoff spot in the ALCS. Gonzalez
had an uncharacteristically poor showing vs. Atlanta (.211)
and must carry a bigger load against the Yankees. Edge:
Diamondbacks.

CENTER FIELD

New York's Bernie
Williams vs. Arizona's Steve Finley: Williams hit home
runs in the last three games of the ALCS and now has 16
post-season blasts, fourth on the all-time list. Finley
doesn't have the same flair for dramatic blows but is still a
productive player and fielder. Williams just seems to make
his hits count the most. Edge: Yankees.

DESIGNATED HITTER

New York's David Justice
vs. Arizona's Erubiel Durazo: Justice is an experienced
DH who knows how to handle the role. Obviously, no Arizona
players have that background, but Durazo and David Delluci
have been so productive off the bench that this lineup
addition could actually help the D-Backs in New York. Edge:
Even.

STARTING PITCHING

In effect, the Diamondbacks
will try to beat the Yankees with two pitchers: Curt
Schilling and Randy Johnson. Schilling might even go with
three days of rest and be available for Games 1, 4 and 7. No
pitchers have thrown as many pitches this season as that duo,
so you have to wonder how much gas is left in the tank. The
Yankees don't have to resort to such tactics because they go
four-deep with Mike Mussina, Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens and
Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez. All four have come
through in the post-season in the past. Four arms usually
beat two, even two outstanding arms. Edge: Yankees.

MANAGER

New York's Joe Torre vs.
Arizona's Bob Brenly: Brenly did a nice job this year in
getting the most from a veteran bunch, and has a smart bench
coach in Bob Melvin. But Torre has four World Series rings in
the last five years, almost certainly clinching a spot in the
Hall of Fame. He usually pushes the right buttons, mainly
because he has the most weapons. Edge: Yankees.

INTANGIBLES

The Diamondbacks are to be
commended for getting to the World Series in their fourth
season, the fastest assent ever. And they are an experienced
group that knows what it takes to win. But this World Series
stuff is old hat for the Yankees, who always seem to do the
right things in October. And, with the city recovering from
the horror of Sept. 11, New York has more incentive than ever
to become only the third team with four consecutive crowns. Edge:
Yankees.

PREDICTION

It's going to be
interesting to see exactly how far Schilling and Johnson can
take the Diamondbacks. Arizona better go on top while they
are in the game because the bullpen is a disaster waiting for
a place to happen. New York already has beaten the two teams
with the best records in the majors this year. The Yankees'
record in the last three World Series is 12-1. This one won't
make it back to Phoenix.

Yankees in five.

When you read the individual head-to-heads, you'll see the
writer is capable of good insight. For example, at DH, he doesn't
assume the well-known Series-tested Dave Justice is automatically
better than the young pair Erubiel "The Hermosillo
Hammer" and David Dellucci because his name is more
recognizable. He's open to the youngsters' strengths, too. On
each comparison, he makes reasonably-informed & reasonable
assumptions. A problem is, they are all presented as roughly
equal, and presumed to be additive, as if an Intangible equalled
a 3rd baseman equalled a Bullpen.

There are ten thousand other reasons this doesn't work as a
prescient predictive model, one of the most important being it
compartmentalizes things that should be viewed as complex,
interactive systems. Some things do lend themselves a
little to this kind of breakdown (schoolground basketball for
one, where the head-to-head matchups are likely pretty consistent
during a game, and where one of the matched players can usually
play better in that match-up than the other and if one team has 3
or 4 edges and the other 2 or 1, the outcome will be the
indicated one fairly often).

The subset of politicians who are primarily poll-driven
instead of ideologically-based are prone to this
counting-as-measuring kind of analysis. This position stands to
win X voters in region Y, while the opposite might win N voters
in region Z.

Again, it's not necessarily destructive, just a model that
doesn't work in complex systems (and most important decisions one
makes are about complex systems, not simple ones). Tools that
make us reduce the variables we are going to marinate in and
distill down the number of options for each we will consider are
necessary steps on the way to conclusions. When we reduce and
oversimplify prematurely, though, we are counting on chance to
give us a boost. People who work this way can be veritable
gushers of incompetence.

It's easy to make decisions this way. It's not generally
useful. In fact, I consider it The Curse of the Budbino.

In the next entry, I'll point to a clever set of fairly simple
set of metrics one of the brightest sabermetricians uses to try
to predict playoff success.

9/28/2004 07:42:00 AM posted by j @ 9/28/2004 07:42:00 AM

Saturday, September 25, 2004

A Red Sox Lesson on Managing "Otherness":The Vicarious Wakefield

"Ninety
percent of this game is half mental"
- Jim "The White Tony Oliva" Wohlford

There's a management bromide that declares a good manager
can manage anything, a belief that management is
content-independent. To some degree, it has a basis in fact; a
good and experienced manager can manage related but different
endeavors based on existing tools and a determination to learn
new information and an openness to temporarily dispose of one's
own habits and embrace others. It drives a manager to bend to a
new environment, and perhaps bend the environment a little, too.

But there are limits to the capacity of managers to bend, and
the Boston Red Sox coaching staff are facing an exemplary case of
that right now that shows the limits of managers to bend to
"otherness". That otherness is Tim
Wakefield, on the surface, merely a cotter pin on the vehicle
of their playoff hopes but in reality, a pretty important small
element that might prevent a wheel (or more) falling off at a
critical juncture.

"Otherness" comes in different flavors. Insofar as a
manager actually can manage "anything", it
helps if that thing has some common points of reference. Someone
who can handle a warehouse, its staff and operations and
paperwork, and inventory objects can generally manage those if
you change, for example, the objects from electronics to
furniture, or from toys to drugs. Hire new staff and move to a
new facility, and she can accommodate that otherness. Change the
support technology (forklifts, wagons, software, racks), and a
good manager will learn the new (at least) well enough to get by.
But take the greatest CFO in the world, and thrust him into this
role, and he might or might not succeed. The otherness of
people-supervised and systems one uses as tools and the rhythm of
the work might just overwhelm even the best financial manager.
Worse, under stress, people tend to revert to the tried-and-true
methods that have brought them success in the past, reducing how
well they can bend to accommodate to the otherness.

But the key element that limits the ability to a good manager
to manage "anything" is coaching. Coaching is a
mandatory element in any managerial assignment that has reporting
staff. And while you can coach what you can't do all that well
yourself, that ability takes a lifetime of effort or the kind of
luck that wins lottery grand prizes to succeed at it.

That limit is proving a hard nut for the Red Sox in their
pursuit of success in the playoffs.

In playoffs, one competitive edge is to have a
"stopper", a monster of a starter who both has great
stuff & nerves of steel. Someone like Randy Johnson or Kevin
Brown or Curt Schilling, a pitcher who even if beaten on a
specific day, you know plays pretty consistently at a high level
and who you can be confident gave you their best on that day.

But the best situation to have is three pitchers who are all
reliable and get you into the 6th or 7th inning while either
dominating or keeping it close enough that a rally can get you
back into the game.

If you have that troika, it means you can be creative and
aggressive with bullpen matchups because you have a little slack
in preserving your bullpen for the next game. And because in a
seven-game series it means you won't be rolling out as a starter
some designated victim who is likely to be overmatched, because
your troika can usually start all the games in a seven-game
series. The Red Sox have two outsanding starters in Curt
Schilling (playoff record in 87 innings is 5-1, 1.86 ERA, 91 K
and a miniscule 73 baserunners allowed), and Pedro Martínez (53
Innings, 4-1, 3.10 ERA, 54 strikeouts, 53 baserunners allowed).

But their third "best", by tradition, would be
Wakefield, a veteran who has "been there before". But
Wakefield, aftre having a perfectly fine #3 starter season
through the end of August (11-7 record, team record of 14-11 in
games he started), turned into a pumpkin in September, a bit
premature for Halloween one might note. His gruesome September
(in reverse chronological order) looks like this:

Except for Texas, these teams are not offensive powerhouses.
The team needs Wakefield to snap out of it, though it's not
necessarily fatal if he doesn't, but to have the best chance in
the month ahead, they need all the help they can get, and
benching Wakefield means putting (probably) their #3 hopes on
Bronson Arroyo, a promising young pitcher with a good 2004 but
who has some extreme splits a manager would need to cover for
(he's a much lesser talent when pitching in Fenway, and while
he's very good against right-handed hitters, he's C- against
lefties, so most opposing managers can stack a lineup with
lefties against him).

Why is Wakefield struggling? ¿Is it because, as Jim Wohlford
might say, 90% of pitching is half-mental? Nobody on staff can
point a finger with any confidence, because Wakefield's
"othernress" is too powerful, because as a
knuckleballer, he's a staffer who's hard to coach because
pitching coaches usually have no experience successfully throwing
a knuckleball, an unusual pitch that the vast majority of
pitchers don't throw because it's so different from other
pitches.

IF YOU FIX YOUR MECHANICS
WILL CLICK & CLACK BE ABLE TO FATHER CHILDREN?

The first tack most pitching coaches and other advisors take
with solving a pitcher's bad-stuff problems is the dreaded
"mechanics". I think a player messing up mechanics is
a frequent cause, but I also believe "mechanics"
is a placeholder word many use when they have no idea what the
problem is.

But in baseball it's the first place a coach will look because
it's something there are tools to analyze and, as a rule,
something a coach could have an effect on. A brief search engine
attack turned up Johan Santana, Sir Sidney Ponson, Matt Morris,
Victor "Not The Entertaining" Zambrano, Jeff Weaver,
and Bartolo "Are You Gonna Finish That?" Colón as
pitchers whose mechanics problems were addressed this year when
things started to turn sour for them over an extended period. In
all those cases though, the pitching coaches who worked with them
had themselves thrown those pitchers main pitches. Each,
therefore, had personal insight into the physical and mental
sequence required to be successful with that pitch.

The knuckler, though, is Other. Sure, about every pitcher (and
non-pitcher) in the game has messed with one occasionally in
warm-ups, but it is mastered by a few, and a small percentage of
people who master get to use it in the bigs (for the change
management and internal political issues around the game's
prevention of knuckleballers, I recommend Jim Bouton's fun &
informative memoir, Ball
Four). Furthermore, the variation in the way individual
knuckleballers throw the pitch when they're being successful is
much higher than it is with the more common pitch choices. And
because virtually all knuckleballers count on that pitch as their
main or only pitch, they can't fall back on another when it's not
going well.

But the worst constraint on a struggling knuckleballer is that
the pitching coach and other team advisors are unlikely to help
the butterfly artist in the way the coach could help Ponson,
Morris, Colón, et.al., because the pitching coach never mastered
its feel himself. And it's logical that a pitching coach who was
a career knuckleballer would almost never be able to cut the
mustard helping more standard hurlers because if the coach had
been mastered a normal three-pitch toolbox, the coach wouldn't
have fallen back on the knuckleball, a last resort.

HALF-MENTAL

So that makes any prospective coach or other helper fall back
on the mental approach -- positive thinking, a pat on the fanny,
few words of confidence. Phil
Niekro once said knuckleballers don't think like other
pitchers, and that makes some sense, because the central
organizing principle of a knuckleballers work is the opposite of
any other pitcher's. The standard pitcher's success depends on
spin/rotation -- even most 98 mph fast balls that don't have a
tail or cut or some x or y axis movement beyond that applied by
gravity are hittable once timed by the hitter. Obversely, the
successful knuckleballer relies on the absence of what all others
rely on the presence of (spin). The standard pitcher is trying to
throw predicatably, the knuckleballer unpredictably (well, not trying...there's
just no way to know which movement the good pitch is going to
have once it leave the hand).

It's not surprising, then, we haven't seen news stories about
some Boston organization coach looking at Wakefield's mechanics.
Even a consiglieres from outside the organization, the
indomitable Charlie Hough, a long-lived knuckleball specialist
himself, doesn't try to counsel Wakefield on his mechanics. In
this recent Boston
Herald article (courtesy Baseball
Think Factory's News Blog discussion), about Hough's view,
the essence was:

``Remember, it's hard to
win with this (knuckleball). He's just fallen into some bad
habits, but they really aren't much of anything.

``It's just confidence.
That's all he needs to get going.''

[snip]

Red Sox pitching coach Dave
Wallace, who was in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization with
Hough during the 1980s, asked the knuckleballer, who lives in
Anaheim, to stop by and meet with Wakefield at Fenway.

``More than anything I just
came by to offer some support for the things he knows,''
Hough said. ``I've known him since he was in Double-A or
Triple-A with the Pirates and I know he has a lot of ability.
And I know he has the ability to repeat (his success).''

Even one of the more successful practicioners doesn't want to
try to analyze and coach what he can't understand.

BEYOND BASEBALL

Have you known a manager who could coach what he doesn't do
well? It's possible, but when an experienced employee is
stumbling or in a funk or a fallow period, the less the manager
knows about the content, the fewer tools she'll have to choose
from and the more likely she'll need to rely on
confidence-building or "mental" approaches. For the recipient, that technique is undermined if the report knows she knows more than the manager (and trust me, when these situations occur, the reports usually know they know more). And if that mental aspect
is not the primary cause of the slump, it most likely won't work.
It doesn't make it impossible for that manager to to do a decent
job if other things fall very well -- just a challenge that
should be attempted only in the most dire of situations.

If a manager's job has direct reports, even the manager who
can manage "anything" is going to face a big challenge
without decent craft knowledge or a passionate commitment to
learning it.

If he doesn't, it's like hitting a knuckleball. And as Charlie
Lau, the Royals' legendary hitting coach once said: "There
are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately,
neither of them works".

9/25/2004 09:58:00 PM posted by j @ 9/25/2004 09:58:00 PM

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

All organizations, baseball or not, get virtuoso performances
out of contributors. Successful ones nurture the achiever, but to
continue benefiting from the virtuousity, to really make the most
out of it, they need to come to understand how the
contributor achieved that performance so they can help her and
others recreate those achievements.

A lot of metrics and analysis is flat. Let me use a baseball
example based on the American League's best pitcher this year,
the Minnesota Twins' Johan Santana. His virtuousity is
remarkable, almost like his American namesake Carlos Santana, he
of the transcendant, always recognizable riffs (Isn't it amazing that even if he's just
backing up someone who plays a completely different kind of
music, you can always pick him out? I've been trying to master
just one of his leads for over two years now, and I'm
still trying to figure out a few of the transitions which seem to
defy the limits of five fingers and a Fender).

You can get a ton of data on Johan Santana. There's the really
simple, flat metric presentation (courtesy of MLB.COM):

W

L

ERA

G

GS

CG

SHO

SV

SVO

IP

H

R

ER

HR

BB

SO

2004

15

6

3.06

28

28

1

1

0

0

188.0

136

68

64

24

47

213

Career

38

18

3.68

145

69

1

1

1

1

584.1

499

254

239

65

213

611

This tells you what he's done on a seasonal level, like the
usual accounting statements non-profits and business put
together. You can tell he's having a very successful year within
a short but successful career. But it isn't actionable.
You can't expect success by telling Johan or his fellow Twins
hurlers to please go out and earn an ERA of 3.06 & strike out
a lot more guys than they walk and expect to infuse success into
the group.

Better, there's the sophisticated annual historical record
(courtesy of Bigleagueplayers):

Last 3 years

Team

G

GS

W

L

IP

H

R

ER

HR

BB

K

ERA

WHIP

BAA

2002

MIN

27

14

8

6

108.1

84

41

36

7

49

137

2.99

1.23

.212

2003

MIN

45

18

12

3

158.1

127

56

54

17

47

169

3.07

1.10

.216

2004

MIN

29

29

16

6

195.0

137

68

64

24

48

224

2.95

0.95

.196

Career

146

70

39

18

591.1

500

254

239

65

214

622

3.64

1.21

.228

This adds some interesting rate (quality measures) at the end,
WHIP (baserunners allowed per inning; anything under 1.3 is good,
and anything under 1.0 is totally superb) and BAA (the composite
batting averages achieved against him). More illuminating, more
specific (you now have a glimmering into why he's won so many
games; bnatters don't hit much against him, he strikes out more
than a batter per inning, and his walks must be relatively low
because his WHIP is under 1). Again, not actionable in a
significant way.

Better yet, there are the really fine "split stats"
(here courtesy of Bigleaguers again) that lump performances into
various components to see if there are specific strengths and
weaknesses in the overall performance.

G

GS

W

L

SV

CG

SHO

IP

H

R

ER

HR

BB

K

ERA

WHIP

BAA

Total

32

32

19

6

0

1

1

217.0

151

68

64

24

49

254

2.65

0.92

.195

G

GS

W

L

SV

CG

SHO

IP

H

R

ER

HR

BB

K

ERA

WHIP

BAA

vs.
Left

32

0

0

0

0

0

0

53.1

37

-

-

5

8

52

-

0.84

.195

vs.
Right

32

0

0

0

0

0

0

163.2

114

-

-

19

41

202

-

0.95

.195

G

GS

W

L

SV

CG

SHO

IP

H

R

ER

HR

BB

K

ERA

WHIP

BAA

Home

20

20

11

4

0

1

1

137.1

95

42

40

14

31

167

2.62

0.92

.194

Away

12

12

8

2

0

0

0

79.2

56

26

24

10

18

87

2.71

0.93

.196

G

GS

W

L

SV

CG

SHO

IP

H

R

ER

HR

BB

K

ERA

WHIP

BAA

Day

17

17

9

5

0

0

0

117.1

83

38

36

13

34

138

2.76

1.00

.199

Night

15

15

10

1

0

1

1

99.2

68

30

28

11

15

116

2.53

0.83

.189

G

GS

W

L

SV

CG

SHO

IP

H

R

ER

HR

BB

K

ERA

WHIP

BAA

Grass

10

10

7

1

0

0

0

66.1

45

19

18

9

16

74

2.44

0.92

.190

Turf

22

22

12

5

0

1

1

150.2

106

49

46

15

33

180

2.75

0.92

.197

G

GS

W

L

SV

CG

SHO

IP

H

R

ER

HR

BB

K

ERA

WHIP

BAA

Indoors

21

21

12

4

0

1

1

145.1

98

44

42

15

31

174

2.60

0.89

.190

Outdoors

11

11

7

2

0

0

0

71.2

53

24

22

9

18

80

2.76

0.99

.204

G

GS

W

L

SV

CG

SHO

IP

H

R

ER

HR

BB

K

ERA

WHIP

BAA

April

5

5

1

0

0

0

0

28.1

30

18

17

5

8

24

5.40

1.34

.273

May

6

6

1

3

0

0

0

32.2

42

22

21

6

11

30

5.79

1.62

.313

June

5

5

4

1

0

0

0

37.2

21

10

10

5

6

46

2.39

0.72

.160

July

6

6

3

2

0

1

1

46.0

14

7

6

4

15

61

1.17

0.63

.095

August

6

6

6

0

0

0

0

43.1

29

11

10

4

7

52

2.08

0.83

.188

September

4

4

4

0

0

0

0

29.0

15

0

0

0

2

41

0.00

0.59

.150

I highlighted in Pepto-Bismol pink some junk results in here
-- numbers that should not have been presented because they can't
tell you anything. There are almost no turf parks left...the
Twins park is one of them, so all this can tell you is how he
pitched at home (already presented) along with a few crumbs of
how he pitched barely elsewhere.

But here is some actionable information if you were looking to
deconstruct Santana's strengths & weaknesses to try and help
him ampfiy the good and dampen the not-so-good. But hark, his
splits are extraordinary. I'm going to use BAA (batting average
hitters achieve against him) as the bellwether for this. If you
can believe them, his performance is extraordinary. BAA by
left-handed hitters is .195, and right handers .195. He doesn't
just crush lefties (many left-handed pitchers can do this), but
he is equally transcendant against righties. Okay. ¿What else?

Home and away. Many pitchers learn to take advantage of their
home park. But again, he's essentially the same home and on the
road, allowing .194 and .196 BAA. This tells you he's either so
overwhelming that it doesn't matter where he's pitching or
alternately, he's figured out how to use almost any park he's in
to his advantage (or both at the same time).

You can also see if you look at the last splits, by month, his
season started with a mediocre April, an Epicacal May and
consistent excellence since. Was he injured? Did he learn
something? Does he do poorly in cold weather? Probably not the
latter, since his smallish sample September is a cool weather
performance month, and he looks veritably Nazgulish (uh, 41
strikeouts & 2 free passes in 29 innings). But this is a data
set that leads us to better understanding of the components of
the success, as well as a set of questions with which to
follow-up.

But again, this is more about Santana's excellence than what
he does to be excellent. How does he achieve that kind of
performance, and more importantly, what is he doing that others
might emulate?

SELF-PROCLAIMED SPORTS DORK SETH STOHS
GETS US TO ACTIONABLE

To find that out, you have to break it down to its unit level.
If you're an analyst, you need to examine what he does in a game,
inning-by-inning. You probably can go down as far as individual
pitches and no farther. In non-baseball work, you'll have to pick
your own level, but start small and get your hands dirty in data
instead of just looking at bigger pictures, because you might see
patterns in individual-event data you might otherwise miss.

I found Seth
Stohs' website thanks to Aaron's Baseball Blog.
Stohs has masterfully analysed Johan Santana's most recent
pitching performance, and although he's blended in some gushy
star-eyed fannish superlatives, I'll snip those puppies out in
the interest of the stodgy, academic flatness of prose for which
I'm known. He's analysed it by looking at the game the way a
competitor would, pitch by pitch. He answers the questions:

What kinds of pitches did Santana throw?

At what counts did he throw which pitches?

What effect did he get from each?

Here's some Seth showing how really good analysts present data
and information both (rasty formatting inherited...I'll try to
clean some of it up, but be warned, Seth's intelligence is a lot
higher than his HTML skill) with my comments in bold:

One of the things that
people define "Ace" with is a guy who, when the
team needs a win, gets the win. Sunday, the Twins didn't
really need the win, but obviously the team would prefer to
go into Chicago on a positive note. I can't imagine a more
positive note... Yesterday was as dominant a pitching
performance as I have seen. Here are the basic numbers:

...............IP H .R ER BB SO
Johan Santana 8.0 7 .0 .0. 0 14

Incredible. Impressive.
Amazing... Enough superlatives? The 14 strikeouts was his
career high. He completely shut down and baffled a hot
Orioles team. His scoreless inning streak increased to 30
(snip). It was his fourth straight start in which he didn't
allow a run. It was his 12th consecutive start where he got a
win. (snip)

Let's dive into Johan's
pitching performance yesterday. (snip) I charted each of his
103 pitches and noted the type of pitch, whether it was a
ball or strike and what the speed of the pitch was. Again,
the speed of the pitch comes from what showed on Fox Sports
Net. Here are just some interesting things to note from the
game.

Of the 103 pitches that
Santana threw, 80 of them (78%) were strikes. 67% is
generally considered good. I don't know if I've seen this
impressive a percentage before. [he looks at a basic
indicator and then puts it into context for others]

[Good breakdown
here. The average # of pitches it takes a pitcher to get
through an inning is around 15-16, and as you look through
this table, you can see the inning he labored the most was 15
throws. You can also see he kept mixing his pitches up. More
detail needed, but Seth will give that to us; this is a good
foundation.]

It was interesting to me
that Santana seemed to be stronger as the game went on. [Good
analysts insert their opinions, presented as opinions and not
as capital T Truth, as well as just crunching numbers, as
Seth does here] His best, most dominant inning may have been
when he struck out the side on 10 pitches in the 8th inning.
[Good analysts point out highlights] Santana was consistent
with his fastball throughout, but check out the velocity of
the pitches he threw by inning (Note - please recall that I
did not differentiate between a curveball and a slider. I
think Santana threw more sliders late in the game):

[Seth doesn't give
you conclsuions on this but its presented so well that other
analysts, in this case, Yours Turley, can provide some
insight. Santana's fastball and changeup were both faster at
the end of the game than at the beginning. He was throwing
easy, not his hardest, through the early going. As the game
wore on, he either started tiring and throwing harder to
compensate, or intentionally sped things up to put the
hitters' timing off.]

Did Santana alter the
pitches he threw each time through the batting order? The O's
had four hits the first time through the order. They had just
one the second time through and two hits the third time
through the order. Santana struck out the top two hitters in
the Orioles lineup, Brian Roberts and Tim Raines, in their
4th plate appearances. [Seth knows but isn't telling
because he believes most readers will already know that
hitters tend to perform better against pitchers the 3d and
4th times they face them in a game because the batter has
already seen what the pitcher has to throw today and can
better guess which pitch as well as time it better. If a
pitcher Ks a batter in a 4th appearance, the hurler either
has so much mojo that day, or is so unpredictable, that the
hitter is helpless in the face of that quality].

So what does this show?
(snip) Putting all of this together, it really just verifies
the fact that Santana is willing to throw any pitch at any
time. He will throw the fastball a little more than half the
time, and the rest of the time, he picks between the
curveball and changeup, and all three pitches are incredible.

Santana was so dominant
yesterday. He only had one 3 ball count. Actually, he had
just three 2 ball counts the whole game. Just again to
illustrate how unpredictable Santana is, take a look at the
pitches he threw on each count: [FB = fastball, CB = curve or
slider, CU = change up]

It is interesting to me to
see that Santana does seem to throw more breaking balls with
two strikes. Of the 14 strikeouts, seven came with the
changeup, four with a curveball and three with the fastball.
So, what is his strikeout pitch? Any of the three. [Great
stuff. Conslusion supported by data. Note, on the one 3-2
count he got to all game, Santana had the unmitigated gall to
throw a curve...an outside-the-Bachs move if there ever was
one] [Seth didn't tell you one of the most important things,
which perhaps he overlooked, but again, his presentation was
so thorough, no plaque, no junk, that it jumps right out for
other analysts. I'll get to this in my next paragraph]

Stohs doesn't point out that there are two missing counts
here, 2-0 and 3-1. That's really important. Because those are THE
two Red Meat hitter's counts, the counts on which batters have
statistically the best chances for success (intermediate and
beginning fans, if your team has runners on base and the count
gets to either 2-0 or 3-1, this is a time to start rhythmic
clapping, even if the P.A. system operator doesn't know to put on
the claptrack). Hitters try to work a pitcher to get to a 2-0 or
3-1 count because it means the pitcher is overwhelmingly likely
to throw a fastball (for most hitters, the easiest, relatively,
to hit).

BEYOND BASEBALL

This is a classic model of analysis and presenting data about
it. Regardless of what line of work you're in, if you want to
communicate both to dedicated peer analysts and more raw outside
observers, slipstreaming Stoh's style here is of great value.
Some of the key elements:

Present data, starting with the big picture

Drill down and present what's significant

Provide conclusions clearly labeled as such

This is actionable. This is the kind of detail that makes
knowledge management possible, and that, in turn, makes future
success, both for the individual contributor and the team as a
whole more likely.

In the next entry, I'll show you a recent illustration of the Anti-Stoh, a big ugly failure of metrics, and how to avoid such fact-plaque.